Attn DP Tech Heads: Matrox Vid cards output Arcade Freq?

[Tetsu]

Hey guys. I'm currently going through this "get rid of clutter" phase, where I want to be able to play my favorite games without having 11 consoles hooked up to one monitor. Emulation is great for one player games, but I want to play multiplayer games with friends via emulation, on a bigger screen rather than hunched in front of a 15" comp screen. I'm looking for the easiest and most cost effective way to do this, for now. I have 4 USB ports on my PC, and plenty of pads so controllers aren't the issue. The biggest obstacle is the screen: I want to connect my Sony PVM 19" RGB monitor to my PC. It is a fixed frequency monitor (TV frequency) with BNC RGB and Composite Sync connectors. I have done some research, and learned that certain Matrox cards have RGB outputs that can be configured to scan at NTSC 15Hz. My question is, has anyone ever used any of these Matrox cards for MAME, or any other application, and if so, which model card? Will it be easy to config the card to do what I want? Thanks in advance for any and all help!

[zektor]

To tell you the truth I have not used an RGB to video out my emulators, so I couldn't say. What I did do however is purchase a Riva TNT2 card with s/vid out (cheap on ebay 20-30 bucks) and ran a really long s-vid cable to my SOny flatscreen tv's s-vid in. Then after installing Nvidia's driver, I installed TV Tool (www.tvtool.de) and used that for changing between monitor and tv (much easier than using nvidia's driver settings...and tv tool can REALLY make the output full screen). AFter all is said and done, buying the card, s-vid cable, and registering tv tool you are looking at $50 maximum. And let me tell you, PERFECT tv out. All the games (everything from Mame, Gens, Zsnes, you name it) are looking absolutely perfect.

[Tetsu]

Thanks for the info, Zektor. One thing my monitor doesn't have is an S-vid output, so I can't connect it to my PC that way. I'll keep looking for a way to do this, but thanks a lot for the help!